Do articles in open access journals have more frequent altmetric activity than articles in subscription-based journals? An investigation of the research output of Finnish universities

Timothy D Bowman,Juha Hedman,Kim Holmberg,Mikael Laakso,Fereshteh Didegah

doi:10.1007/s11192-019-03301-x

Timothy D Bowman, Juha Hedman + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03301-x

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Abstract

Scientific articles available in Open Access (OA) have been found to attract more citations and online attention to the extent that it has become common to speak about OA Altmetrics Advantage. This research investigates how the OA Altmetrics Advantage holds for a specific case of research articles, namely the research outputs from universities in Finland. Furthermore, this research examines disciplinary and platform specific differences in that (dis)advantage. The new methodological approaches developed in this research focus on relative visibility, i.e. how often articles in OA journals receive at least one mention on the investigated online platforms, and relative receptivity, i.e. how frequently articles in OA journals gain mentions in comparison to articles in subscription-based journals. The results show significant disciplinary and platform specific differences in the OA advantage, with articles in OA journals within for instance veterinary sciences, social and economic geography and psychology receiving more citations and attention on social media platforms, while the opposite was found for articles in OA journals within medicine and health sciences. The results strongly support field- and platform-specific considerations when assessing the influence of journal OA status on altmetrics. The new methodological approaches used in this research will serve future comparative research into OA advantage of scientific articles over time and between countries.

Highlights

The results showed an 18% increase in citations by publications being available Open Access (OA), that positive effect was due to other mechanisms than publishing in OA journals which was found to have a negative effect of 17% less citations than all publications on average
When examining relative visibility field by field we find that publications in OA journals of earth and related environmental sciences as well as in physical sciences gain events in Mendeley, WoS and other four platforms more often than publications in subscriptionbased journals of the same fields (Table 3)
The results showed significant platform specific differences in the OA advantage, as well as disciplinary differences, as could be expected

Summary

Introduction

This research investigates whether scientific articles with at least one of the authors affiliated to a Finnish university and published in OA journals (Gold OA) are more often cited as indexed by Web of Science and mentioned on different online platforms such as Mendeley, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream news, blogs and Wikipedia. Relative visibility answers the question, whether publications in open access journals gain at least one event more often than those published in subscription-based journals.

Results

Conclusion